Years ago, I first became a consultant after working in an environment for several years as an accountant.  The environment was such that the IT partners I had in several organizations including a Fortune five hundred company, as well as an startup company, both typically failed to find a way to an able the enterprise team comprised of the accounting, business and marketing, and logistics organizations, to work effectively with the IT team.

The IT team was unable to communicate in terms of the business problems that the enterprise teams were facing.  Those same enterprise teams were well versed in IT, and as a group would tend to dominate over the IT team.  We did this out of necessity to get things done in advance the company, but often times we neglected important messages from the IT team because they were unable to communicate with the enterprise team.

Our inability to communicate in a common language foiled us on more than one occasion.  This would always result in the enterprise team having to go to extraordinary manual processes to fix whatever was wrong.  We were able to evolve over time, but it was never an easy nor a clean process.

I’ve been investigating the technology by a company called Active Endpoints.  They create a technology solution called ActiveVOS.  I’m still learning how this technology works, but I will attempt to put it into layman’s terms.  I’m doing this because I find the technology and the solution extremely interesting and useful.

If I understand how it works correctly, the enterprise team such as an accounting group or business group or both working together, can map out a business process using Visio.  They can walk this process into ActiveVOS, which you can think of is a software program to conceptualize it right now.  It’s actually a little bit more than that, but just think software program for now.

Once you walk the process from Visio into ActiveVOS, you can then begin to build the actual system that will run that process.  The whole concept is based on business process execution language solutions.  It employs business process management techniques that enable the two different teams of the enterprise and IT to not only talk together in a common language, but work together in a common system.  That system being ActiveVOS, essentially a SOA Software development, design and improvement solution for Service Orientated Archictectures (SOA).   This enables enterprises and developers to:

1. Automate business processes
2. Collaborate across IT and business boundaries
3. Control the overall state of the business
4. Adapt rapidly and easily to change

Click Image to See Video Demo (about 9 minutes, gets good at about 4 minutes)

Now the thing that sold me on this concept, and made me very interested in this service solution, is a quick video demonstration that Active Endpoints provides.  In the presentation, they show you the simple diagram of a business process, and they walk you through the real world case study or example of a business that’s attempting to take a request for an estimate from a customer online, in turn that estimate into real-world action within a company, that generates an estimate using multiple contributors to have to create that estimate, and track the entire process.  In this particular example, they utilize not only the business’ website, but they also utilize Google docs as the engine behind the CRM system.

That aspect alone was enough to pique my interest in this particular tool.  Now, this is not necessarily a tool that you can flip on and start working with within a few minutes.  However they do offer a free thirty day trial, and you can test drive the program before you buy.  With that in mind, they have a very deep support system including many different training videos, and documents to help you figure out exactly what you need to do, and how you can do it.  If their educational section is lacking, you can also hire their services to come in and trained yourself or your team.  They can also help with the implementation of the system in this regards as consultants.

You can find more on this software and the Business Process Management philosophy and practice that drives it at their website ( www.activevos.com ) .

The company also manages a well orchestrated blog called Vosibilities or the ActiveVos Blog (www.vosibilities.com ).

I ran into a set back in the Website Upgrade about a week ago.  I was working to include a dynamic css menu system that would automatically update every time I added a page into my content management system.

I compared several different tools and pulled the trigger on CSS Menu Writer a Dreamweaver extension.

To make a long story short, the software did not do what I expected nor did it do much of anything the way I expected it to do it!

That said after essentially walking through one user issue after the next all week long, by the end of the week, I had figured out how the tool actually works, and I had conceived a way to achieve my goal anyway, even though the software isn’t actually designed to make things such as I wanted, easy.

Fortunately, I have some strengths in working with content management systems and databases, and so I was able to compensate for the software programs shortcomings and still use some of its capability to achieve the same result.  So now, I am back off to the races to work to finish migrating the site over into the new system and make up for the week I lost with the wisdom that I gained.

One of my primary goals is to have the new site up and tuned heavily before August when I will fly out to LA and Vegas for back to back conventions.  By the time those events come around, I want to insure that my website is reliable and make the least of my worries be the search for some good hotel deals.

Over the last six months I have had a crash course in marketing utilizing direct marketing lists.  During that time, I have worked with a number of providers of specialized direct marketing services.  I have seen some very good marketing practices and services and I have seen some services that were not worth paying for.

As I proceed into 2008, my own company will be focusing even more on this market.  It is currently going through a rapid upheaval as many direct marketing services fail and as many others consolidate with each other.

It has been my experience that if a company is looking to buy mailing list leads they need to do their homework and focus on companies that provide both consulting services and highly specialized metric analysis.  It is also imperative that the data be timely. 

Too many companies sell old information that is not worth the email it is attached to or the CD that it is stored on.

But possibly the most important aspect of working with these types of leads is to insure that the company buying the information has the technical means to work with the data and close deals or complete transactions with the opportunity they are purchasing.  If a company does not have this technical means to work with the data then just purchasing a cheap list is a waste of money.

A list is not needed, a full fledge consulting solution is required.  This will mean that shopping around list prices will be nothing more than a comparison of apples to oranges.  When consulting solutions are needed, the only way to garnish results is to test the service provider and grow into the relationship preferably in a way that generates results with the help of the consultants, but also trains the purchasing companies people in how to achieve the same results and data analysis and management expertise.

I worked as a Finance Manager for a number of years. Over that time I oversaw a number of complex collections groups and at times we outsourced our collections to factoring companies.

There is a right time and a wrong time for a company to factor their invoices through a Factoring Service. The decision should not be made lightly but can be advantageous both for your company’s bottom line but also for the credit of your customers. Factoring invoices and outsourcing the collection on those invoices to a company specializing in those services can save you time and money and overhead. Your invoices are not something that can just be handed off and forgotten about soon after. It takes a good amount of time to properly plan the transition and plan the management of the new relationship with your future factoring partner. Any company that does their homework in these two areas, can definitely save money, save overhead, offer their customers lower prices and help their customers build out better credit. Factoring prices are reasonable and can be comparative to the costs that many companies reserve for bad debt and pay for inhouse collections. However, if a company attempts to hand over the invoices and ignore the partnership no savings will be found. To put it a different way, you do not want to outsource a broken inhouse process. Fix your culture and your process first, and then factoring can be a useful service.

Note. For anyone considering factoring services, I have offered my consulting services in this area since 2005.

As I mentioned recently I have recently investigated the potential to link QuickBase into Microsoft Project. The ability is there today. A user can download a desktop application that serves as the tool that downloads the relevant data from QuickBase and pipes it into Project. You can then work on it in Project and later push it back up to QuickBase.

Via this tool, It should be theoretically possible to create a link from QuickBase to the Desktop Ap to Microsoft Project and then to Mindjet’s MindManager and all the way back again.

Given Mindjet’s past work with an accelerator that works with Salesforce.com I recommended that QuickBase should consider exploring contact with MindJet to build out a similar accelerator there as well. QuickBase would have a greater advantage over Salesforce.com in this potential future. QuickBase provides CRM like Salesforce.com but it also provide Project Management and general Database abilities (plus online access in real time to that Database!).

So in theory an Accelerator could enable QuickBase to become the online Database element for MindManager that could enable realtime sharing of MindMaps across Networks!

Now they just need to meet each other and collaborate.

“Intuit let me introduce you to Mindjet.”

“Mindjet let me introduce you to Intuit.”

Sounds like a joint venture made in heaven.

One of the messages out of Hyperion’s recent Las Vegas trade show was the anouncement that Hyperion and Microsoft would be working to integrate their Business Intelligence solutions more closely.

Hyperion, Microsoft To Integrate BI Solutions: “Hyperion – a business performance management (BPM) solutions leader, and Microsoft will integrate their respective BI solutions. This collaboration will enable broader deployment of complementary BI solutions from Hyperion and Microsoft to customers that have adopted components of each.

For example, Hyperion customers will be able to use SQL Server Reporting Services to access Hyperion System 9 BI+ Essbase Analytics, and also display Microsoft reports in the Hyperion System 9 Workspace environment.

Microsoft customers will be able to access SQL Server Analysis Services data using Hyperion System 9 BI+. Also, Hyperion System 9 will leverage SQL Server Integration Services for data access.

Users will thus benefit by combining reports and data from both Hyperion and Microsoft data sources into a unified enterprise view.

‘Microsoft is committed to its expansive partner network building on the Microsoft platform and to continuing to form strong relationships with our global independent software vendors (ISVs) to benefit our mutual customers,’ said Robert Bernard, GM – global ISV group, Microsoft.

‘By integrating our leading BPM technology with Microsoft technology, we accelerate our ability to help our customers achieve information democracy – a state in which actionable insight is in the hands of all – across their enterprises,’ said Howard Dresner, Chief Strategy Officer, Hyperion. “